Question for Sam Harris

Very few, if any, appreciated the natural beneficial relationship relationship between the atheist and believer. Probably just this suggestion gives the impression of my being deranged. However Simone Weil, in her usal laconic fashion, allows one to experience the potential for this relationship.

Simone Weil was a celebrated French Marxist and social activist who died a Christian mystic. Leon Trotsky admired her intelligence and she became an intellectual influence on Pope Paul V1.

Albert Camus wrotein 1951:

Simone Weil, I still know this now, is the only great mind of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing.

For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure.

She wrote:

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 417

Do you have the humility to admit the possibility that you have a supernatural part that has not yet opened? This part if it exists is unnecessary for our daily lives described as within Plato’s cave but yet is what makes human conscious evolution into the “New Man” as described in the Gospels, a human potential?

Just out of curiosity - how many replies or posts from Sam Harris do you see in the Forum?

Nick_A - 30 March 2012 10:37 AM

Do you have the humility to admit the possibility that you have a supernatural part that has not yet opened? This part if it exists is unnecessary for our daily lives described as within Plato’s cave but yet is what makes human conscious evolution into the “New Man” as described in the Gospels, a human potential?

I have to wonder here, have you read anything Sam has written?

Perhaps you should try it again, reading for comprehension, with the understanding that this question is actually fairly well addressed in his works. To the point that I disagree with him on some points.

I’ll give you a couple of teasers:

“What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.”

“A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.”

Now I ask you, Do you have the humility to admit the possibility that you have a magical unicorn part that has not yet opened?

Do you admit the possibility that leprechauns could leap out of your posterior at any moment?

Do you admit the possibility that Hercules is the real son of God and a person from history, as attested to by Titus Flavius Josephus in his Histories?

And what does admitting the merest possibility of anything have to do with reality when there is an infinite number of such absurdities?